POV-Ray

Quote:Originally posted by Camacho
>now out of those, I believe pov ray has the best rendering quality
PR can make some nice images, although I hear that the Mac version is SLOWER than the PC/Linux versions. I don't know the status on this issue to comment though.

The problem is that povray wants double precision floating point numbers, while the altivec can only do single precision, thus they could not do some serious altivecing action on it.

Aways, it depends on the rendering you do and how many lights you use. On my slow as heck machine, I can generally render my 200x150 image with 5 lights in 1 minute with level 2 antialiasing and level 9 quality.

Quote:Originally posted by Camacho >abandonware" applications like Infini-D and RayDream Studio
Technically, both are NOT abandonware. Eovia owns the rights to both, and markets their line to the customers of those apps.

>now out of those, I believe pov ray has the best rendering quality
PR can make some nice images, although I hear that the Mac version is SLOWER than the PC/Linux versions. I don't know the status on this issue to comment though.

MegaPOV is very fast. There used to be this nifty Infini-D to POV Ray utility. Very cool. Much easier than figuring out POV's scene language.

I finally got around to trying MacMegapov and I was impressed. I havenít really done anything with Povray in years and Megapov was rendering much faster than I remember, although to be fair my current machine is much faster than the one I used back then. Meshwork can also export to Povray format. I have been experimenting with it a little and am going to see how the combo of using Meshwork as the modeler and Megapov as the renderer works out. Anyone else have experience with this and have hints on using the two together?

I was able to experiment a little using Meshwork and MegaPov and was able to come up with this.

It is AlphaMan, a low poly model made by Todd DeMelle and is one of he examples included with Meshwork. The only texture is the face and I just used a swatch of color for that. (note that I didnít create the art, I am only a fair programmer and a worse artist)

When you export the Meshwork object over to PovRay format it creates an .inc file. When you create your scene file you have to make sure and scale this down significantly as is outlined at the Meshwork Web Site http://codenautics.com/meshwork/povray.html

I modified the scene file (.pov) from the Meshwork site and here is the part which deals with adding the exported object from the .inc file that Meshwork generated.

// Load the Meshwork include file, and call it "AlphaMan"
#declare AlphaMan = union {
#include "AlphaMan.inc"
}
// (note: wrapping the include with "union" is not needed
// if your export comes from Meshwork v1.5 or later)

// instantiate the "AlphaMan" object
object { AlphaMan scale 0.008
}

Note that the model is scaled down by a factor of 8000!

In the .inc file it puts in placeholder texture names like texture1.png, texture2.png etc. You have to manually edit these in the .inc file to match your actual texture name or rename your textures to match the .inc file. This part is outlined at the Meshwork Site.

It renders within a few seconds on my ibook 500. I think that this combo would be great to create sprites, GUI objects, splash screens etc. I hope this is useful to someone. If anyone else has used this combo please let us know of any tips you might have.